Kenny Vance and the Planotones
rock band from the USA
Kenny Vance and the Planotones is an American musical group led by Kenny Vance, formerly of Jay and the Americans.
Original group
Kenny Vance and the Planotones first came to be as a fictional band appearing in the 1978 film American Hot Wax. The band consisted of Kenny Vance and the members of the existing disco trio Brooklyn Dreams (Bruce Sudano, Joe Esposito and Ed Hokenson).
In the film they were portrayed as a very popular group with many hits and sang songs that were actually by artists like Danny & the Juniors and The Del-Vikings.
The Planotones
After leaving Jay and the Americans, Vance formed Kenny Vance and the Planotones in 1992. The band currently includes Johnny Gale, Kurt "Frenchy" Yahjian, Jimmy Bense, Chip Degaard and Tony Gallino as his band and they began touring. Kenny's son Ladd also performs with the Planotones. The group plays doo wop songs of the 1950s and 1960s and their original material is strongly influenced by it. They have released four albums to date which include both original material and covers.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Kenny Vance and the Planotones” as rock band from the USA. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6391236. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kenny Vance and the Planotones” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.